Tuesday, February 19, 2019

Tennessee has its own billionaire-funded
non-profit “think” tank to push the school privatization agenda in the state. It’s called the State Collaborative on
Reforming Education (SCORE), and among financial
backers are the “Hyde Family Foundation, the Ayers Foundation, and the Benwood
Foundation. National supporters include the Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation.”

When state officals or state legislators need data to
justify their bashing of educators and public schools for the performance
levels that are guaranteed by low state funding and high poverty, they turn to SCORE. SCORE’s
president, David Mansouri, has
an MBA from Vandy and is a founding board member of a Nashville charter school,
where he still serves as Chairman of the Board. It’s
hardly a surprise, then, that one of SCORE’s top
priorities is to increase the number of charter schools in the state, even as
charter schools come under increasing
scrutiny for corruption
and low performance.

Tennessee’s senior U. S. senator, Lamar Alexander, was
instrumental in passage of federal legislation that guaranteed continued high
stakes testing and a continuing supply of vulnerable public schools that will
be targeted for charter conversion. Under the ESSA federal statute, the state’s
lowest performing schools (bottom 5 percent) each year are subject to charter
conversion, and the bottom
ten percent are put on a state priority warning list.

Ironically, the charter school “solution” has become part of
the poor performance problem. In examining
the rankings of Tennessee’s K-12 schools, I discovered 40 of Tennessee’s 112
charter schools that are in the bottom 10 percent of the state’s K-12 publicly-funded
schools. This would, in effect, make these
40 charters eligible for intervention under the ESSA federal statute that was designed
to provide an ongoing supply of public schools for charter conversion. Almost
half (55 of 112) are in the bottom 20 percent of state schools.